watchOS 8 wished Adam Engst a happy birthday recently, which was both a nice touch and a small surprise. He also discusses some quirky problems related to printer drivers.
New FaceTime features like links, grid view, and a Web client make FaceTime in iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey more competitive with video conferencing apps like Zoom.
This week, Adam asks for help tracking down an email formatting bug in TidBITS issues, points those worried about ransomware to RansomWhere and Retrospect 18, and looks at more utilities that perform OCR on text in images.
In the ongoing saga of things rattling around in Adam Engst’s head that don’t merit their own articles, Adam shares the fact of Apple’s new temporary iCloud Backup storage, passes on a story about Screen Time settings inexplicably changing, talks about moving TidBITS to a new virtual private server, and notes an upgrade to the TidBITS News app.
Frustrated by wanting to write about various topics that are either too big or too small (or too something) for a full article, Adam Engst resorts to sharing some short stories that may be enlightening, enjoyable, or just allow him to close a loop in his head.
Apple’s Numbers and Pages apps provide a plethora of charting choices. But neither helps you with the crucial decision regarding what type of chart to use for which kind of data. Here’s a roundup of your choices, and some advice as to when each should be used.
Multitasking on the iPad has been a mess for years, thanks to relying on obscure gestures. With iPadOS 15, Apple has added a new Multitasking menu that provides a visible interface along with a new center window option, a shelf for open windows, and a radically enhanced App Switcher.
Glenn Fleishman’s 14-year relationship with Quicken 2007 finally ended this year. But it took a dead motherboard, an old Mac mini, and a conveniently timed tip for him to break with his accounting software past.
With these utilities from different developers, you can extract text from any image on the Mac or search for text in your photos on either the Mac or iPhone. Text in images is no longer just pixels.
Faced with a need to drive to as many as 43 different spots in the same trip, Adam Engst found a mapping solution that calculated the optimal route and provided stop-by-stop voice navigation on the iPhone.
Sometimes you want to take a screenshot of a dialog that’s attached to a window. It turns out you can do this by pressing Command-Shift-4, pressing the Space bar, and then holding down the Command key when you mouse over the desired dialog.
Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 14 with a new Notes feature that recognizes the extent to which many users keep numerous untitled documents open in BBEdit at all times. The release also provides significant enhancements to source code editing thanks to support for Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol.
Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 365 service promises to let you stream Windows from the cloud to a Mac or iPad. It could be a win for those looking for an x86 Windows solution on an M1-based Mac.
If you’re perturbed by Google’s tracking and profiling based on your searches, there’s a new alternative in town that doesn’t, like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, rely on Microsoft Bing. The new Brave Search provides fully anonymous searches using an independent search index, though it also currently checks its results for quality against Google using anonymous queries.
If you’re a Mac user who wants to turn Google Docs into a standalone app using a site-specific browser, you have at least seven choices. However, as Adam Engst discovered, there’s a great deal of variability in the site-specific browser world, and a number of the options work poorly with Google Docs in particular.